A Spy by Nature (2001) Page 9

  ‘It would interest me to know what sort of work SIS is involved in now that the Cold War is over. Is industrial espionage the main focus?’

  Rouse knits his fingers.

  ‘For obvious reasons I can’t talk about the specifics of my own operation. But, yes, industrial espionage, competitive intelligence - whatever you want to call it - poses a very grave threat to British interests. Purely in economic terms, allowing British secrets to pass into the hands of rival organizations and companies is catastrophic. There is an argument, in fact, that industrial spies are more damaging to British interests in the long term even than Cold War traitors. That’s not to say that we aren’t still concerned with traditional counter-espionage measures.’

  ‘What about organized crime?’

  Rouse stalls. I may have hit upon his area of expertise.

  ‘You’re talking about Russia, I assume?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A local problem, though one that will spread to the West if allowed to go unchecked. Likewise, the danger posed by religious fundamentalism. These are the kinds of issues we also take an interest in.’

  Rouse has folded his arms across his belly, where they rest defensively. He will say no more on this subject.

  ‘Can I ask a more specific question about your lifestyle?’

  ‘Of course,’ he says, apparently surprised by the frankness of my request. He moves forward in his chair, all of that weight now bulked on the desk in front of him.

  ‘Have you lost contact with the friends you had before you joined the intelligence service?’

  Rouse runs a finger down the left-hand side of his cheek.

  ‘Have I lost contact with my friends?’ A wistful silence lingers. ‘You’re perhaps talking to the wrong man. I’ve never been one for cultivating friendships.’ A grin appears at the side of his mouth, a little memory tickling him. ‘In fact, when I was applying for the job, I was asked for a number of written references and I had trouble finding enough people who knew me well enough to give an account of my character.’

  I smile. It seems the right thing to do. Rouse sees this.

  ‘Is that something that has been worrying you? Losing touch with your friends?’

  I reply quickly:

  ‘Not at all. No.’

  ‘Good. It shouldn’t necessarily. During my initial two-year training period in London I worked alongside an officer who had a very busy social life. Seemed to enjoy himself a great deal. There’s no absolute standard.’

  ‘But you have friends in Washington? Professional associates? People that you are able to see on a private basis away from work?’

  Rouse emits a stout snort. And what he says now crystallizes everything.

  ‘Let me tell you this,’ he says, his eyes fixed on mine. ‘An SIS officer is asked to blend his private and professional selves into a seamless whole. We make no distinction between the two. An officer has, in a sense, no private life, because it is through his private life that much of his professional work is done. He uses his friendships, brokers trusts outside of the professional world, in order to gather information. That is how the system operates.’

  ‘I see.’

  He glances at his watch, a digital.

  ‘It appears that our time is up.’ It isn’t, but he knows where this conversation is going. They cannot risk telling me too much. ‘Why don’t I leave you with that thought?’

  He stands up out of his chair with heaviness, the white shirt more dishevelled now. A man with no friends.

  ‘Thank you for coming in,’ he says, as if it were a matter of choice.

  ‘It’s been interesting talking to you.’

  ‘Good,’ he replies, without emphasis. I start backing away towards the door. ‘I’m glad I could be of some assistance. We will see you in the morning, I trust.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And with that I close the door. No handshake again, no contact. I walk briskly in the direction of the common room with a light, flushed sense of success. The building is strangely quiet. The doors to the various classrooms and offices leading off the corridor have been closed and in the distance I can hear a Hoover being dragged up and down on a worn floor.

  The common room, too, is empty. Everyone has gone home. There are plastic cups strewn across the low table in the centre of the room, one of which has tipped over and soaked a portion of the pink business insert of the Evening Standard. Chewed broadsheet pages lie stiffly against the back of the sofa, fanned out like a tramp’s bed. I just look in and turn away.

  Elaine is in the downstairs foyer, slouched against the wall. She is inspecting her nails. They are clear-varnished, neatly manicured.

  ‘Fancy a post-mortem drink?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, no. No thanks. I’m just going to go home. Watch some TV.’

  ‘Just like the others.’

  ‘Just like the others. They’ve all gone home, have they?’

  ‘MMmmm.’

  ‘How come you’re still here?’ I ask. ‘I thought you finished an hour ago.’

  ‘Met an old friend. Went for a coffee and forgot my bag.’

  A lie.

  ‘Tomorrow, then,’ I tell her unconvincingly. ‘Tomorrow we’ll all go out.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Tomorrow.’

  7

  Day Two

  The morning of the second day is taken up with more written papers, beginning at nine a.m.

  The In-Tray Exercise is a short, sharp, sixty-minute test of nerve, a lengthy document assessing both the candidate’s ability to identify practical problems arising within the Civil Service and his capacity for taking rapid and decisive action to resolve them. The focus is on leadership, management skills, the means to devolve responsibility and ‘prioritize’ decisions. SIS are big on teamwork.

  Most of us seem to cope OK: Ogilvy, Elaine and Ann all finish the test within the allocated time. But the Hobbit looks to have messed up. At his desk his shoulders heave and slump with sighing frustration, and he writes only occasionally, little half-hearted scribbles. He has not responded well to having his mind channelled like this: concision and structure are contrary to his nature. When Keith collects his answer sheet at the end of the exercise, it looks sparse and blotched with ink, the script of a cross-wired mind.

  The Letter-Writing Exercise, which takes us up to lunch, is more straightforward. A member of the public has sent a four-page letter to a Home Office minister complaining about a particular aspect of the legislation outlined in the In-Tray Exercise. We are asked to write a balanced, tactful reply, conscious of the government’s legal position, but firm in its intent not to cave in to outside pressure. The Hobbit seems to find this significantly easier: sitting there in his blue-black blazer with its cheap gold buttons, he is no longer a sweating, panting blob of panic: the letter allows for a degree of self-expression, for leaps of the imagination, and with these he is more comfortable. There is a general sense that we have all returned here today locked into a surer knowledge of how to proceed.

  I have lunch for the second time at the National Gallery, and again buy a ham and cheese sandwich, finding something comforting in the routine of this. Then the greater part of the final afternoon is taken up with more cognitive tests: Logical Reasoning, Verbal Organization, two Numerical Facility papers. Again there is not enough time, and again the tests are rigorous and probing. Yet much of the nervousness and uncertainty of yesterday has disappeared. I know what’s required now. I can pace myself. It’s just a question of applying the mind.

  At three thirty I find Elaine in the common room, alone and drinking coffee. She is sitting on a radiator below one of the windows, her right leg lifted up and resting on the arm of the sofa. Her skirt has ridden up to the mid-section of her thighs, but she makes no attempt to cover herself, or to lower her leg when I come in.

  ‘Nearly over,’ she says.

  I must look exhausted. I settle into one of the armchairs and sigh heavily.

  ‘My brain is numb. Numb.’<
br />
  Elaine nods in agreement. Bare-skinned thighs, no tights.

  ‘You finished?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘One more.’

  Our conversation is slow monosyllables. It feels as if we are talking like old friends.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Interview with the Departmental Assessor.’

  ‘Rouse? He’s a straight-talker. You’ll like him.’

  ‘What about you? What do you have?’

  ‘Just the shrink. Four thirty.’

  ‘Nice way to finish off. Get to talk about yourself for half an hour.’

  ‘You’ve had her?’

  ‘Yesterday. Very cosy. Like one of those fireside chats on Songs of Praise.’ Elaine stands up, smoothing down her skirt. ‘We’re all going to the pub later. Sam’s idea.’

  ‘He’s a leader of men, isn’t he? Takes control.’

  Elaine smiles at this. She agrees with me.

  ‘So meet you back here around five fifteen?’

  I don’t feel like drinking with all of them. I’d rather just go home and be alone. So I ignore the question and say:

  ‘Sounds all right. Good luck with your interview.’

  ‘You too,’ she replies.

  But in Dr Stevenson’s office I fall into a trap.

  There are two soft armchairs in the corner of a hushed warm room. We face one another and I am looking into the eyes of a kindly grandmother. Stevenson’s face has such grace and warmth that there is nothing I can do but trust it. She calls me Alec - the first time that one of the examiners has referred to me by my first name - and speaks with such refinement that I am immediately lulled into a false sense of security. The lights are dim, the blinds drawn; there is a sensation of absolute privacy. We are in a place where confidences may be shared.

  Everything starts out OK. Her early questions are unobtrusive, shallow even, and I give nothing away. We discuss the format of Sisby, what improvements, if any, I would make to it. There is a brief reference to school - an enquiry about my choice of A-levels - and an even shorter discussion about CEBDO. That these topics go largely unexplored is not due to any reticence on my part: Stevenson simply seems happy to skirt around the edges of a subject, never probing too deeply, never overstepping the mark. In doing so she brokers a trust which softens me up. And by the time the conversation has moved into a more sensitive area, my guard is down.

  ‘I would like to talk about Kate Allardyce, if that would be all right?’

  My first instinct here should be defensive. Nobody ever asks Alec about Kate; it’s a taboo subject. And yet I quickly find that I want to talk to Stevenson about her.

  ‘Could you tell me a little bit about the two of you?’

  ‘We broke up over six months ago.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she says, and then, with sudden horror, I remember the lie to Liddiard. ‘I was led to believe that she was your girlfriend.’ She looks down at her file, staring at it in plain disbelief. Mistakes of this kind do not happen. She moves awkwardly in her seat and mutters something inaudible.

  It was a throwaway deceit: I only did it to make myself appear more solid and dependable, a rounded man in a long-term relationship. He asked for her full name, for a date and place of birth, so that SIS could run a check on her. And now that the vetting process is over they want to square their deep background with mine. They want to know whether or not Kate will make a decent diplomatic wife, a spy’s accomplice. They want to hear me talk about her.

  My left hand is suddenly up around my mouth, squeezing the ridge of skin under my nose. It is almost funny to have been caught out by something so crass, so needless, but this feeling quickly evaporates. The humiliation is soon total.

  Out of it, I knit together a shoddy retraction.

  ‘I’m sorry. No, no it’s my fault. I’m sorry. We just… We just got back together again, about three months ago. Secretly. We don’t want anybody to know. We prefer things to be private. I’m just so used to telling people that we’re not back together that it’s become like a reflex.’

  ‘So you are together?’

  ‘Very much so, yes.’

  ‘But no one else knows?’

  ‘That’s correct. Yes. Except for a friend of mine. Saul. Otherwise, nobody.’

  ‘I see.’

  There is a disappointment in the tone of this last remark, as if I have let her down. I feel ten again, a scolded child in the headteacher’s study.

  ‘Perhaps we should talk about something else,’ she says, turning a page on my file.

  I have to rescue this situation or the game is up.

  ‘No, no. I’m happy to talk about it. I should explain. Sorry. It’s just that after we broke up I never spoke about it to anyone. No one would have understood. They might have tried to, but they would never have understood. They would have put things in boxes and I didn’t want that. It would have trivialized it. And now that we are back together both of us have made a decision to keep things between ourselves. So we’re used to lying about it. Nobody else knows.’ An uneasy pause. ‘This must sound childish to you.’

  ‘Not at all.’ I may have got away with it. ‘But can I ask why you broke up in the first place?’

  This is expressed in such a way that it would be easy for me not to answer the question. But my sense of embarrassment at having been caught out by Stevenson is substantial and I do not want to refuse her request.

  ‘Largely on account of my selfishness. I think Kate grew tired of the fact that I was always withholding things from her. I had this insistence on privacy, a reluctance to let her in. She called it my separateness.’

  There is suddenly a look of deep satisfaction in the lined wise eyes of Stevenson. Separateness. Yes. A good word for it.

  ‘But you don’t have a problem with that any more?’

  ‘With privacy? No. Not with Kate at least. I’m still an intensely private person, but I’ve become far more open with her since we got back together.’

  This emphasis on privacy could even work in my favour: it is in the nature of intelligence work.

  ‘And why did you want to give the relationship a second chance? Do stop me if you think I’m being unduly intrusive.’

  ‘No, no. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. I wanted to try again because I started thinking about the future. It was that simple. I looked around and thought about where I wanted to be in ten years’ time. The sort of life I wanted to have. And I realized I’d thrown away the best chance I had of a kind of happiness.’

  Stevenson nods encouragingly, as if this makes absolute sense to her. So I continue.

  ‘It’s one of the cliches of breaking up, but you simply don’t know how much you love something until it’s taken away from you. I’m sure you come across this all the time in your profession.’

  ‘All the time, yes.’

  ‘That’s the dangerous thing about being in a serious relationship with someone. In a very worrying sense, love guarantees you.’

  ‘And then all that was taken away from you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A first gathering of pain here. Don’t show it to her. Tell her what you know she wants to hear.

  ‘So I set myself a task. I tried to get it back. And luckily we hadn’t killed too much of it off.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ Stevenson says, and I believe that she is. Everything I have told her is the truth about me, save for the plain fact that Kate has refused to come back. I had killed off too much of it, and she has now moved on.

  Stevenson writes something down on my file, at least three lines of notes, and for some time the room is quiet save for the whisper of her pen. I wonder if the others were as open with her as I have been.

  ‘I was interested by what you said about not knowing how much you love somebody until they are taken away from you. Is that how you felt about your father?’

  This comes out of the silence, spoken into her lap, and it takes me by surprise. I don’t recall mentioning my father’s
death either to Liddiard or to Lucas. Hawkes must have told them.

  ‘In a way, yes, though it’s more complicated than that.’

  ‘Could you say why?’

  ‘Well, I was only seventeen at the time. There’s a toughness in you then. An unwillingness to feel. What do Americans call it - “denial”?’

  A lovely amused laugh. Making out that she is charmed by me.

  ‘But more recently?’

  ‘Yes. Recently his death has affected me more.’

  ‘Could you say why?’

  ‘On a basic level because I saw the relationships my male friends were having with their fathers in the transitional period from their late teens into early twenties. That was obviously a key period for some of them and I missed out on that.’

  ‘So the two of you weren’t particularly close when you were a child? You felt that your father kept you at a distance?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. He was away from home a lot.’

  Oddly, to speak about Dad in this way feels more deceptive than what I have told Stevenson about Kate. It is not a true account of him, nor of the way we were together, and I want to explain some of this to her.

  ‘This is difficult for me,’ I tell her. ‘I am rationalizing complex emotions even as I am talking to you.’

  ‘I can understand that. These matters are never simple.’

  ‘I can hear myself say certain things to you about my father and then something else inside me will contradict that. Does that make sense? It’s a very confusing situation. What I’m trying to say is that there are no set answers’

  Stevenson makes to say something, but I speak over her.

  ‘For example, I would like my father to be around now so that we could talk about Sisby and SIS. Mum says that he was like me in a lot of ways. He didn’t keep a lot of friends, he didn’t need a lot of people in his life. So we shared this need, this instinct for privacy. And maybe because of that we might have become good friends. Who knows? We could have confided in one another. But I don’t actively miss him because he’s not here to fulfil that role. Things are no more difficult because he’s not available to offer me guidance and advice. It’s more a feeling that I’ll never see his face again. Sometimes it’s that simple.’