Exposure

Prologue

It isn’t what you know or don’t know: it’s what you allow yourself to know. I understand this now. I’m on my way home, in a second-class smoker from Victoria. I stare out over the network of roofs, shining with rain. The train wheels click into a canter. I have to change on to the branch line at Ashford, but that’s a long way yet.

It turns out that I knew everything. All the facts were in my head and always had been. I ignored them, because it was easier. I didn’t want to make connections. I’ve begun to understand that I’ve been half-asleep all my life, and now I’m waking up. Or perhaps I’m kidding myself, and it’s like one of those nightmares where you push your way up through sticky layers of consciousness and think you’ve woken. You sweat with relief because it’s over. You’re back in the waking world. And then, out of the corner of your eye, you see them coming.

I dream that I’m back at Stopstone. It’s night, and I’m huddled in bed. At last I manage to tip myself over the border into sleep, and it’s then that my door bursts open and my brothers crash into the room. They pull the bedclothes off me. They don’t need to tell me not to cry out. One grabs my feet and the other grips me under the shoulders, drags me half off the bed and then lets go and takes hold of my wrists instead. They swing me and my shoulders burn. I’m afraid they will pull my arms out of their sockets. I can smell the sweat of them. It’s stinky, like grown-up sweat. They lug me to the window. I see that the sash is right up and I don’t know how they did that. They push and shove until they have bundled me on to the sill. Now they are each holding one of my arms. The terrace is below me, two floors down. They will drop me and tell everyone that I was sleepwalking. They say nothing but they work together. There is a push in my back and I scrape over the sill and dangle from my brothers’ hands. Now I hear them counting: ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two …’

Soon it will be over. Perhaps I will fly. Perhaps they will let go of me and I will fly over the grass and the dark trees and the lake and they will never see me again. But my animal breath pants out of me and urine trickles down my leg.

‘… one …’ They shake me, as if they want to shake me wide-awake in case I miss any of what they are doing to me. Perhaps they want me to cry out now, but I can’t.

‘BLAST-OFF!’

I never went beyond that in my dreams. I woke in my cell.

I never spoke about it to anyone but Giles. I opened myself to him. I don’t even know whether I trusted him or not. The word didn’t apply. There was nothing Giles didn’t know about me. Nothing in me that he couldn’t touch.

I’m not sure about love. What it is, and what it means. But now I think that nobody is sure. Instead, we conspire to convince one another. That winter afternoon in my digs on the Madingley Road. Giles was sitting on my bed, reading. Every so often he would turn to me. He didn’t smile. He would take me in, and then he would go back to his book. I was sure then.

Once the train reaches Ashford, I have to change on to the branch line. There is a little train to the coast. There are any number of stops before it reaches the last one. East Knigge. Lily, and the children.

I’ve got some time yet. I tell myself I’m going home, although I’ve never seen the place before.

1

The Whistle Blows

November, 1960

It starts with the whistle of a train, shearing through the cold, thick dusk of a November afternoon. Lily Callington hears it as she digs over her vegetable patch at the bottom of her garden in Muswell Hill. For a second she’s startled, because the whistle sounds so close, as if a train is rushing towards her along the disused railway line at the bottom of the garden. She straightens and listens intently, frowning. The whistle goes through her, touching nerves so deep that Lily doesn’t even know where they are. The children! They aren’t here. She can’t see them, touch them, keep them safe—

Stop it, you fool. They are not babies any more. Paul is ten, Sally almost nine. Even Bridget is five. They’re at school. What could be safer than a primary school in Muswell Hill? She’ll walk down there for three-thirty, and wait in the Infants’ playground with the other mothers until the little ones spill out of the doorway. Always, there’s a half-second when the appearance of Bridget startles her, as if the daughter in her head doesn’t quite match the boisterous schoolchild whom her teacher calls ‘a chatterbox’. Lily wants to kneel down and open her arms for Bridget to hurtle into them. She wants to fold herself around the sturdy little body. Of course, she never does. She smiles, and waves, like the other mothers. She smoothes Bridget’s dark curls, and asks if she has remembered her PE bag.

They’re not babies. She, Lily, is a married woman in her thirties with a house and a job. Her feet are planted in safely mortgaged earth. Lily smiles at herself, a little derisively, as the wind shifts and the noise of the train whistle is carried out of hearing. The train is far away now. She puts her right foot on the shaft of the fork, jiggles the handle slightly and eases the tines deep into heavy clay. Her heart steadies. You should drink less coffee, she tells herself. All those years and still the old panic blazing up in her veins. She looks down at the clods of London clay that cling to the fork. There’s three-quarters of the patch left to do, and she likes digging. The soil must be opened up for the winter frosts to work on it. You are standing on your own patch of earth. Your name is Lily Callington. You are in England now.

Giles Holloway hears the train whistle too, as he mooches through Finsbury Park. He’s close to the main line and the sound is clear. There it goes, getting up speed for the race to the north.

Giles wears a midnight-blue overcoat which might have been elegant on a more elegant figure, but even the skill of his tailor hasn’t been able to overcome Giles’s crude bulk of chest, shoulder and belly. In these streets, he and his coat draw second glances. He might be a landlord, in search of a couple more houses to cram with Irish labourers. Giles hears the train whistle, and to him it says, as it always does: Elsewhere. He knows exactly which train he will catch, if ever he needs to disappear. He won’t go anywhere near the Channel ports. King’s Cross to Newcastle, and then the ferry to Bergen.

Everything that surrounds him is provisional. It won’t and can’t last: history has already decided that. But it’s decades since Giles was introduced to that way of thinking, and, like his overcoat, the cover of such thoughts doesn’t quite fit over the weight of what life has done to him – or, to be fair, what he’s done to life. From time to time, he stubs his mind against the solidity of this world that history has decided against, as they used to say in secret, smoky, ardent meetings all those years ago. They were so certain then. Nothing had touched them. What they believed was as fresh as a sheet of paper with nothing written on it. Fascism must be defeated, and be replaced by a new and better world.

Of course they had no illusions. They understood that omelettes couldn’t be made without breaking eggs. Sacrifice – even the sacrifice of others – was heroic, correctly understood. How they struggled for the correct viewpoint, overcoming the handicap of their class origins and bourgeois culture. Actions that appeared grubby, even furtive, would be revealed in all their clarity once history had swept away the debris of capitalism. For the time being, there must be secrecy. Concealment was an art you had to learn, and then you saw it everywhere, although you’d never suspected its existence until you began to be part of it. Giles remembers Julian Clowde’s rather cold, self-satisfied smile as he took stock of Giles and made him understand what was what.

It was passionately exciting, but you never showed it. An inner ring within an inner ring. If you didn’t know that the inner ring was there, you saw nothing. It was there in plain sight, but camouflaged. You saw a group of friends on the summer grass by the river, laughing, and you passed on with a quick, ignoble pang because you were not one of them. You had to be beckoned in. Initiated. Julian had beckoned him in. Julian had watched Giles, got to know him, tested him as you test an inner tube in a bowl of water to see where the puncture is. Giles had had a lot to learn. First of all, he had to learn to become silent about his opinions. He became humorous about his young self and its ludicrous pronouncements on politics. Now he’d grown up and seen the world as it was. He knew that others were doing the same, and that they wouldn’t necessarily even recognise one another for what they were. They had learned everything about concealment in the open.

Julian smoothed Giles’s way, and Giles glided into place. Lunches were had in quiet clubs, overtures were made and accepted, and there you were, old boy, lodged in position, vouched for by men who had the ear of everyone who mattered. Have you come across Giles Holloway? I’d like you to meet him.

There you were, and no one knew what you were. Giles was a pirate then, flying his own flag under the very bows of the great ship of state. He’d always rather fancied that notion. And then there was the war.

Nineteen forty-seven. Back to London. Back to the Admiralty and back under Julian’s wing. Older now, though. The years were going by. On it all went: those documents, those damned dingy documents, on and on. The sails of Giles’s little ship hung limp.

Here he is still, after all those years. On goes the world, blithe and satisfied with itself. London is more grey and massive than ever, and it’s tiered with chaps whose opinion of Giles Holloway is no longer as sanguine as it once was. Giles has not fulfilled his early promise, from any point of view. When he catches sight of himself in shop windows he turns away. He isn’t fifty, for Christ’s sake, but he looks old and paunchy, his cheeks purpled, his eyes … Well, it’s never a good idea to look into your own eyes.

No need to do so. We aren’t meant to see ourselves as others see us. In fact it would be a bloody dull world if we did, because no one would ever make a fool of himself again. We might as well accept that we’re put on this earth to make unwitting entertainment for our fellow men, and get on with doing so. The thought eases him, as it always does. Whatever balls-up he might have made of things, it can’t matter much. The train whistles for the last time, hurtling into a future that the dull streets can’t imagine.

He crosses the road, glancing up at the pale, cold sky, and then down at his watch. It must be later than he thought, because he begins to walk rapidly and with purpose. He comes out on to the main road, passes the dairy and turns into a pub. At the bar he orders a double Black & White before glancing casually around. Most of the tables are empty. A young man, a clerk perhaps, nurses his half-pint in smoky peace. In the corner farthest from the window, another man sits reading the sports pages. He looks up as Giles approaches, then down at his paper. He reads on, absorbed. From time to time he reaches out an automatic hand to lift his glass to his lips.

Giles settles himself with his whisky. The fire in the grate is made up, but not lit. If this were any other pub, Giles would have the barman over and the fire going in no time. But today, in this place, Giles doesn’t choose to exert his personality. He doesn’t even tell the barman to keep the change, with the habitual easy generosity that gets him remembered next time.

The man at the other table reaches for the packet of Senior Service on the table in front of him, fumbles out a cigarette and strikes a match. But he’s awkward, and the match snaps in a fizz of flame. It’s out before he can light his cigarette. And it’s his last match. The box is empty. He shakes it, annoyed. The business has drawn Giles’s attention.

‘May I offer you a light?’ he asks courteously, taking out his lighter. The man half rises, cigarette to his lips, but Giles is too polite for him, has already left his seat and is leaning forward to proffer the lighter. His bulk blocks the table from the bar. His thumb flicks the lighter catch and a perfect small flame, like a crocus, appears. The two men’s faces are illuminated as they lean towards it. Their hands are in shadow. They are worshippers at a nativity, come from far away. The packet of Senior Service on the table moves a fraction, and then is still again.

The two men are back at their separate tables. Giles drinks off his whisky. The bar is cold and stuffy, not a place to linger. The other man has sunk back into the sports page. Giles looks at his watch again, stands up, and with a nod to the barman he is out of the door. He walks briskly now, towards Finsbury Park station and the Piccadilly Line to Green Park.

Paul Callington hears a train whistle too, but he’s not sure if it’s in his head or outside it. He’s been daydreaming about Top Shed at King’s Cross. He’s a practical boy, and knows that school is probably too far from the main line for him to hear the train in reality. If the wind is from the east, he might just catch the sound. Luckily, old Craven insists on open windows throughout the winter.

Paul has already finished the Practice Intelligence Test, but he doesn’t want old Craven to know this. Craven is not fond of what he calls ‘clever clogs’, and is happy to enforce the point with a knuckling from his bony fingers. If you finish a paper early, you should spend the remaining time checking methodically through your answers. But there’s no point in checking; Paul knows that his answers are correct.

He bends over his paper, all apparent concentration. Ten minutes more for thinking about trains. The 10.00 a.m. Flying Scotsman, King’s Cross to Edinburgh Waverley, gathering speed … Maybe Dad will take him to King’s Cross again soon. They buy platform tickets and watch the trains. Paul’s dream is to visit Top Shed. He tastes the names of the locomotives: No. 60113, Great Northern; No. 60052, Prince Palatine; No 60103, Flying Scotsman. It’s only Paul and his father who go on these trips. Sally isn’t interested, and Bridgie is too small. Mum gives them sandwiches and a flask of tea. Dad knows a lot about trains, but Paul knows more. He can tell Dad how the German smoke deflectors work on the modified No. 60059, Tracery. He hopes there’ll be another Saturday like that soon.

The whistle shrieks again, but this time Lily, Giles and Paul hear nothing. The train is already beyond the confines of the city.

2

The Oddity of the Flat

It’s the oddity of the flat that does for him, in spite of all the years he’s lived here. It’s not really a flat at all. Flats should be on one floor, and his is not. You go down the bedroom corridor, open what looks like a cupboard door, and there’s a narrow flight of stairs which twists round on itself as it rises steeply to a landing. From the landing, further steep steps rise to an attic room.

The whole place is an absolute bloody death-trap. Giles Holloway has always known that. But he likes the attic, and it’s useful. As far as he knows, from his discreet enquiries, no other top-floor dweller in the block of mansion flats has a secret attic. It was a quirk of the builder, no doubt. The possession of this tucked-away space pleases him.

He knows the place like the back of his hand, but still he falls. He had a bottle of ‘52 Pomerol at dinner. Giles has little interest in wine, but he knows what to order. Afterwards, at home, the usual bottle of Black & White on his desk, and the soda siphon.

Giles works on into the night, feeling rather than hearing the vibration of Big Ben’s chimes through the walls. Suddenly, it is two o’clock. He gets up, stiff-legged, and crosses to the window. He pulls up the blackout blind that for some reason he has never taken down, and stares across the roof-tops. Rain falls steadily. The tiles glisten. He thinks of what it would be like to cling to those tiles, scrabbling for a foothold, sliding inexorably downwards to the gutter. Get a grip, he tells himself.

He is the only one awake to see the wet roof and hear the tick of rain on the tiles. Everybody else is asleep. Giles likes to be the only one on the qui vive. Even more than this, he likes to be awake here, in his eyrie, high up and hidden. Oddly, he thinks, tapping a fingernail on the window-frame, one never feels that there is anything wrong with being alone once it’s past midnight. In fact, one feels more alive, as if one has scored, somehow, over the sleeping world. Earlier in the evening, at dinner, say, it can make Giles uneasy. Not that he is often alone then, unless he chooses to be.

My little room, he thinks sentimentally, glancing back at it under the strong downpour of light from the unshaded bulb. The wood beneath his finger-tips is spongy. The frame is rotting and at some point he’ll have to have the window replaced. But not yet. He’s been putting it off for years. He doesn’t want workmen up here.

The utility desk at which he works was already here when he first bought the flat. Someone must have hauled it up the stairs, God knows how, and decided there was no point in ever trying to get it down again. Giles has added a single bentwood chair and a narrow corner cupboard, like a school stationery cupboard. The floorboards are bare. On the wall behind the desk there is a small painting, no more than eight inches square, and poorly framed. It’s a very early Kandinsky, painted with meticulous realism. Few would recognise it as a Kandinsky at all. There’s a river, a haystack, a long flowing horizon. Giles likes it all very much, just as he likes everything in the room. Soda siphon, bottle of Black & White, Waterford tumbler. There’s a file on the desk, open. If it were closed it would be possible to read the words stamped in red on the cover: ‘Top Secret’.

Giles remembers the days of Most Secret. That phrase was more attractive, somehow. He preferred it to Top Secret, which has always struck him as rather childish. Minox next to the file. Such a perfect little camera for the job; you couldn’t improve on it.

No need to tidy things away, up here. No one else ever comes. Pigeons walk up and down on the windowsill sometimes, crooning noisily on summer evenings. He supposes that they are there all day long, when he’s at work.

No one ever comes, but the attic is not what it once was. Even the bloody pigeons get on his nerves. Watching everything. Winged vermin. Once they laid an egg, just one, exposed on a little pile of rubbish they’d put together. He swept it away.

These last months, he’s been jumpy. He has nailed the window shut. There’s been one too many of those carefully casual, probing conversations. A character called Frith seems to be everywhere these days. Julian calls him ‘Mr Plod’. Frith even had the nerve to drop in to Giles’s office for what he no doubt thought was a ‘discreet chat’ about Giles’s visits to the Nightshade. As if Giles hasn’t been going there for years. It was pure officiousness. What the hell were they playing at? He broached the question with Julian, but you might as well try to have a word with the Cheshire Cat as with Julian when he doesn’t want to be pinned down.

‘You’re not getting nervy, I hope, Giles?’ Julian barely breathed the words, but there was a touch of scorn in them that stung.

He can’t make Frith out. Cool as an oyster, not very bright you’d think, until you caught the oystery gleam behind his glasses. Frith has been dropping in more and more frequently.

‘Try to be a little more discreet, my dear Giles,’ said Julian in passing, at a party.

Giles stopped taking files home, but not for long. He couldn’t stop for long. He’s always known that. He waits a few weeks, then once again, as evening comes, he puts his briefcase on his desk, and then, leisurely, places into it the file that he requires, before snapping shut the lock. Giles is all serenity at such moments. The art of hiding in plain sight used to be second nature, and now it has become the whole of him. But this file, tonight, is rather different. It ought never to have been on his desk at all. Julian had signed it off earlier today; yesterday, now. He was leaving for Venice at noon, but he had come in to deal with one or two urgent matters. There were his initials: JRC, the last of three sets of initials. The three pairs of eyes that were cleared to see the file. Julian had sauntered into Giles’s office, dropped the thing on his desk and chatted for a few minutes about the prossimo spettacolo at La Fenice. As he insisted on calling it. Julian was no linguist, thought Giles; he ought to stop trying to talk Italian.

‘Get it back to Brenda when you’ve finished with it.’ Brenda was Julian’s secretary. ‘Absolutely trustworthy and discreet,’ was the way Julian described her. Or, more accurately: Deaf, dumb, blind and quick with her hands. And then Julian had buggered off in his tweeds, and there was the file, at which Giles then looked closely for the first time. Christ, he thought. Christ.

Quarter past two. Time for bed. Even so, he watches the rain. It’s not that he couldn’t survive if he had to leave London. But Moscow … Those leaden winter days, those awful clothes and the still more awful perfumes that women wore to cover the fact that bathrooms were in short supply. The monstrous, garish architectural ensembles. Endless ballet. Taking his holidays on the Black Sea and grateful for it. ‘Moscow? It’s like Birmingham, my dears, but without the bright lights.’ Cue gales of laughter. Good old Giles. He speaks frightfully good Russian, you know. After the war he was in Special Intelligence in Berlin, all very hush-hush …

As usual, they’d got it all wrong, but that suited Giles. They flitted around him, filling his glass, talking about I Puritani – they’d absolutely loved it but it was a thought too long, didn’t he agree? – and how they’d adored The Country Girls. Giles said the kind of things he’d always said. Outrageous, that was Giles. Witty, shocking, quotable: Have you heard Giles’s latest? Cue more gales of laughter.

Or did they laugh? He frowns. He seems to remember being alone, in the middle of the party. A joke that didn’t come off. He’d slopped more whisky into his glass – there was never any decent whisky at these parties – and gone out on to the terrace. It was dark and quiet. He looked back into the lit-up room and the party that went on without him. Mouths opened and closed, heads were thrown back in whinnies of laughter, hands were put out to trap an interlocutor. He was losing his touch, but, more than that, he couldn’t care less, even when that booby Firclough raised his eyebrows prissily and turned away. Giles leaned against the stone balustrade. He was cold and sad, as he sometimes was after sex. It was passing from him, that erotic, delicious pleasure of being at the heart of things.

Parties are not what they were, thinks Giles now, looking out at the rain from his attic window. Everyone is so bloody dull these days. Stuffed shirts. He’d once made the mistake of taking Princess Margaret’s elbow to steer her across the room. It was pure courtesy, for God’s sake. There was a crush in the club and he knew a discreet little exit. The way she’d looked at him had sent him three paces backwards. My God. Nicky in Istanbul had told him she was pure poison, her visits the dread of embassies all over Europe. Now he believed it. But she’d liked him. She’d leaned forward and laughed at one of his jokes.

To hell with her. To hell with the lot of them. He glances at his desk. The file and the Minox are there as ever. He works so hard, twice as hard as anyone realises, and he gets no credit for it. He’s never cared before. Self-pity: can’t have that. Should be a cold fish like Julian Clowde. You’d never catch Julian feeling sorry for himself.

Giles has always had a strong head, but lately he’s been waking with a jolt of panic, as if something too dark to remember has taken place during the night. Slowly, the day takes care of it. He follows the same routine every morning. He draws a cold bath, takes the chill off it, plunges in and scrubs himself vigorously with Pears Soap and a loofah. He wraps himself in a towel and walks around his flat like a Roman emperor, eating toast and marmalade and whistling songs from the music hall.

His days appear fixed. The early walk to the Admiralty. His sprawling notoriously untidy desk, his high-handed carelessness, those breakfast cups of scalding tea at regular intervals, the fug of Senior Service that slowly fills his office. He lunches on a bench in Green Park. It’s a well-known Holloway eccentricity: ‘Giles is a fresh-air fiend.’ Sometimes he will meet an acquaintance. Sometimes he will sleep for an hour in the sunshine. He never drinks during the day. Evenings: dinner, the club, then perhaps going on to other little clubs with a quite different clientele. The Nightshade, for instance, or Bobbie’s. Occasionally he’ll bring someone back, but he’s cautious about that. All the boys know one another and are terrible gossips. He doesn’t want the flat to become common currency.

Time for bed, old son, or you’ll be like death warmed up in the morning. Time to do something about those sodding pigeons, too. Rat poison? Would that work? Carefully, Giles tucks the Minox and measuring chain into a drawer and puts tumbler, siphon and whisky bottle on to a tin tray painted with the face of Father Christmas wreathed in holly. He uses this tray year-round. Upstairs and downstairs it goes, with everything that he needs to sustain him through the night shift. He could keep the whole caboodle up here permanently, he supposes, but he can’t be fagged with washing up. He’ll leave it in the kitchen and Ma Clitterold will sort it out in the morning. She never comes up here. He keeps the staircase door locked in case she should take it into her head to explore.

He hooks his foot around the attic door to close