Autumn in Oxford: A Novel Page 14

  He shook his head. “I still can’t help but feel to blame . . .”

  Before he could continue, Liz grabbed his lapel and pulled him to her. “It’s not you. I had to start working long before we met.” She was still holding him to her. “Besides, without that job of mine, we would never be able to do this.” She kissed him deeply, then released him. “My children mean everything to me, Tom. I can’t always be there with them. But most of the time I can bear that. I just need to know they’re close. So I can be there when they laugh or need to cry. I really do think you understand. I’ve seen you with them myself, the year we were neighbours on the crescent.”

  Tom picked up the little car and took it to the elderly shopkeeper, snoozing in a chair leaning up against the side of his shop. After a moment’s haggling, she saw him reach into his pocket and hand over some banknotes.

  When he returned with it, Liz was quizzical. “I thought you said it would be risky bringing something obviously French like that back for the children.”

  “I’m going to hang onto it . . . until I can . . .” Tom didn’t finish the thought. Instead he stepped closer to her. “Look, Liz, if we ever get this mess sorted, I want to be with your kids too.”

  Warmth surged through her as he pulled her to him. For a moment Liz feared she’d collapse into tears, but then she mastered herself. Instead, there was a long and comfortable silence as they walked along holding the package between them. Finally, Tom spoke. “Does Trevor feel the same way about the children as you do?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. He wants to send them off to boarding school now that they’re old enough. But I can’t give them up. That’s why we compromised on the Dragon. When Ian gets a little older, I may have to give in . . . if we can afford it. When I’m travelling, the au pairs’ve always done the childminding—breakfasts, getting them to school, collecting them afterwards, taking them to friends—along with household duties. It’s one more expense, but every time I suggest getting rid of the au pair, he resists.” She was about to say that Trev’s work as an estate agent made it difficult to mind children. But Trevor Spencer was not even selling used cars any longer. She wouldn’t lie to Tom, but she didn’t want to look like a fool either.

  “Why do you think he’d try to keep them in a divorce?”

  “Well, there’s the child support he’d get. But that’s not the main thing. The kids are another badge of upper middle-class respectability. The Dragon School—these days the only social circle he wants to mix in is the school parents. His kids are going to be part of the establishment if it’s the last thing his wife does for them!” She went on quickly, “It’s not just that the children matter for him as symbols to other people. Sometimes I think they’re part of a charade he carries on to fool himself.”

  Tom spat out the thought before he could modulate it. “You’re saying that for Trevor having kids at the Dragon was just a way of getting into the right club?”

  “I suppose so. Let’s change the subject.”

  That evening Tom and Liz sat under the sail-cover-blue canopy on the terrasse of la Méditerranée, a seafood restaurant across the Place de l’Odéon from the Comédie Française. This one had been Liz’s choice.

  As the waiter arrived with menus, she looked at Tom. “Permitez-moi?” He nodded. “Do you like oysters?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  She addressed the waiter. “Pour commence, monsieur, une douzaine du fines du claire numéro quartre.” Then she looked down the wine list and pointed to a Chablis. “Et ca.”

  “Tres bien.” The waiter smiled and left.

  When they’d been served and Tom selected a shell and surveyed it, Liz cautioned, “Please don’t tell me what it looks like to you. Just gulp it down.”

  Each sipped the wine, and Liz reached for a second oyster. Tom wiped his mouth. The preparation made it evident to Liz that he was going to say something serious. “My turn to make a confession.”

  “You were in a psycho ward too?” She felt confident enough to make the joke.

  “Worse. I was a spy.”

  “I don’t think I’ll mind—unless you were a spy for the Germans.”

  “Nothing like that. How much do you want to know?” Tom’s question was serious.

  “Probably more than you’re allowed to tell me.”

  He smiled. “I doubt it. More cloak than dagger. First time was right at the end of the war. The OSS—Office of Strategic Service, that’s what they called it—plucked me out of the army. I speak Finnish—my mother’s language. So they sent me to Helsinki to organize listening posts to monitor Soviet communications.”

  “Was it exciting?”

  “No, and I turned out to be a bit of a headache for the OSS. You see, all through the war, the FBI was doing everything it could to kill off the OSS. J. Edgar Hoover wanted to control not just spying stateside; he wanted to run all the spies the US had abroad too. But that was the OSS’s job. When the war ended, he started lobbying the president to abolish the OSS and give the job to his FBI.”

  This history was lost on Liz. “So, where do you come into it?”

  “Well, Hoover was a nut about leftists of any kind in the government. Now, right from the start, the OSS didn’t have the same . . . scruples, qualms. They’d take on anybody with the right skills, no matter what their politics. They knew I’d been a member of the Communist Party as a kid, and they didn’t care. But Hoover did. He got hold of a list of OSS operatives, right down to the lowest level, and combed it for people the FBI had been keeping tabs on for ‘subversive’ activities. I was pretty far down that list, but I was on it.”

  “So . . .” Liz prompted.

  “So, I was one of the first casualties in the war between the OSS and the FBI. OSS got rid of me as an embarrassment. I didn’t really mind. Helsinki was boring. Besides, I wanted to go back to school, and there was the GI Bill. So I took the hit and left. Hoover managed to get Truman to close down the whole OSS a year later. When the Cold War heated up, they realized their mistake and started the CIA. That was in ’47.”

  “Is that it?” Liz was not impressed. “Fired by the OSS?”

  “There’s a little more—and it was more exciting. Five years later, the CIA sent me back to Finland for a week or so to help rescue some . . .” Tom’s voice trailed off while his thoughts ran on, remembering what had happened and what hadn’t, and the warning he’d been given. Suddenly he didn’t want to talk about his life as a spy. He had to contrive a finish to the sentence without saying much more. “To help rescue some gear—decoding equipment, transmitters, that sort of stuff. Knowing Finnish when no one else does can really make you popular sometimes.” He laughed at the absurdity of the notion.

  “Doesn’t sound like I’m in much danger knowing any of this. Can’t you tell me something more exciting?”

  “Maybe, when I get to know you better. Now let’s order the rest of dinner. I’m in a hurry to get you into the sack.” He pushed his knee against her thigh.

  Liz smiled. “Can we really get to know each other any better?”

  The sleeper to London left the Gare du Nord at ten o’clock. Liz would be able to get a full day’s work in on Friday, provided she got any sleep. She planned to get as little as she could. It was a plan Tom fell in with.

  They were standing in the corridor outside their compartment, with the large window slid halfway down, smoking and watching the darkened outskirts of Paris move by. The still, cloudless sky was illuminated by a receding glow from the city and a pale but full moon. As the conductor passed, Tom stopped him and offered their tickets to be stamped. Wise precaution, Liz observed. They wanted no knocks on their compartment door this night. The conductor franked the tickets, asked for their passports, touched his Kepi in a French salute, and headed to his own compartment at the end of the carriage. They would not be disturbed until the train approached Victoria Station.

  Watching the lights flash by, Liz lit another cigarette and said the obvious. “I wish
I had a solution to our problem, Tom.”

  “Actually, there is a simple solution.” He tried not to sound facetious. “Get rid of Trev.” Liz looked at him in real horror that dissolved as Tom began to laugh. “Seriously—or, rather, not so seriously—I’ve been amusing myself trying to figure out how to get away with it.”

  “Ghoulish,” she said, but she was smiling. “And what have you come up with—poison, a garrotte? You can’t get a handgun in England.”

  Tom nodded. “Besides, you’d never get away with using a weapon. It has to look accidental.”

  “So, what have you contrived, Agatha Christie?”

  “Best thing I’ve come up with is an accident in the London Underground. Bump, shove, push Trev from a crowded platform in front of an oncoming train. Walk away calmly, hoping no one in the crowd can be sure it wasn’t an accident or that it was me who pushed him.”

  Liz’s verdict was immediate. “I’ll visit you in jail, Tom.” They both laughed.

  She flicked her cigarette to the tracks and watched the embers make a visible arc as they died away. “I’m going to change. Stay out till you’re invited. The compartment is too small for two people to move round in.”

  “What are you going to change into? Can I have a preview?”

  “Maybe some of the lingerie we bought on the Rue Bonaparte.”

  “But that’s too expensive to rip off your body.”

  “Splurge.”

  One morning in late October there was a message for Tom from Michael Foot, the Tribune editor, to call his London number. By now Tom finally had an instrument—that is what the installer called it—in his rooms on stairway XXI. He wouldn’t have to use a college line—finally.

  “Michael Foot here.”

  “Ah, I thought I’d be getting a secretary. This is Tom Wrought.”

  “Good of you to call back. No secretaries at the Tribune. Can’t afford ’em. Listen, I may have a juicy item for you—Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago.” Foot paused, inviting a question Tom didn’t need to ask. This novel, by an important Soviet author, had been smuggled out of Russia and published to universal acclaim in the West and deep embarrassment in Moscow. It was the talk of the senior common room at Trinity. Foot went on, “Ordinarily we don’t review fiction. But the Nobel Prize announcement yesterday will cause a firestorm in Russia. The right-wing press has been trying to make Pasternak a big stick to beat the Soviets. Now it’ll get worse.”

  Tom surprised himself by disagreeing. “Steady on. The Soviets have done themselves more damage trying to suppress Pasternak than any Western cold warrior could.” That’s a switch, a Yank trying to get a Brit to calm down, he thought.

  “Still, I want to fight back a little. Pasternak is no anti-Communist. He’s apolitical. The anti-Communists have no right to use him that way.”

  “And you want me to politicize him from the left?”

  “Take any line you like; we’ll print it.”

  “Well, I read the novel last spring, and I rather liked it. I’ll have to say so.”

  “I’ll send a copy round.”

  “Hello, Thomas.”

  Tom looked up from the Pasternak review typescript in his lap and recognized the owlish face. It was Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Chichele professor of political philosophy, who immediately set himself down into the adjacent chair and put a brace of books on the side table between them. Berlin was a frequent visitor to the Trinity senior common room and had rather taken Tom into his circle. As an American and a historian, Tom held attractions for Berlin, who had spent the war in America for the Foreign Office.

  Berlin looked down at the side table, then up again at Tom. “I say, this is a coincidence.”

  “Nice to see you, Prof. What’s the coincidence?”

  “That book next to you, and the ones I just plunked down.” There next to Tom’s copy of Dr. Zhivago in English were two volumes, a hardback and a small volume, smaller even than cheap paperbacks. On the spine of each there were Cyrillic letters, Д-р Живаго. Tom looked at the two books and then blankly at Berlin.

  “Of course, you don’t read Russian. Silly of me. They are both Dr. Zhivago. Got them in Brussels at the World’s Fair last week. Funny enough, in the Vatican pavilion.”

  Suddenly Tom was interested. “Why the Vatican pavilion?”

  “Can’t say. There were stacks of both, free for the taking.” Berlin paused. “And lots of takers, mainly Russians. The Russkis are letting some of their people out—party faithful—to see the Soviet pavilion.” Berlin glanced at Tom knowingly. “So, if they drop round to the Vatican exhibition, what do they find? The very book their government won’t allow anyone at home to read—in Russian, and small enough to carry back in your shirt pocket if you are worried about your luggage being searched at Soviet customs.”

  “May I?” Tom picked up the two volumes—the large one hefty, the small one dense and pocket-size, like the Bibles that had been handed out to American soldiers before D-day. He dropped them on his lap and opened them. There was some non-Cyrillic printing on the flyleaf of each. But there was something odd: the large version was printed in Holland, the small one in France, by a different publisher. Why, he wondered?

  Tom handed back the books. “Thanks, Shaya.” Berlin had been in the United States long enough during the war to adopt the custom of “Christian names” with his American friends. His was not Isaiah, but a diminutive, “Shaya.”

  Berlin had been watching him look over the volumes. “I see you noticed that too.” Before Tom could say, “Noticed what?” he leaned forwards and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “These books give off a smell I’d detect from OSS operations we’d hear about in the Washington embassy during the war.”

  “But the OSS was abolished in 1946.”

  “Yes, my dear boy, and the CIA was established in 1947.” He smiled. “Say no more.” Berlin didn’t need to. Tom had found the angle for his Tribune review.

  “Excuse me, Shaya, I have some work to do.” Tom rose and carried the typescript back to his rooms.

  A week later the cheque for Tom’s review arrived from the Tribune, together with a note from Michael Foot. From the salutation he knew he was back in Foot’s grace and favour.

  Dear Tom,

  Well, you’ve put the cat among the canaries again. The suggestion that the CIA may have organized the dissemination of Russian editions back to the USSR certainly made your piece stand out.

  As you saw, we published anonymously, as with your piece on the atomic spies.

  But I should warn you we have received a number of calls asking for the name of the reviewer. We have refused to comply. One of the calls was from an old chum of mine, who may be in MI6. He asked me if our Zhivago reviewer was the same person who reviewed the Rosenberg book a few months ago. Such unwonted interest is slightly worrying. Please dispose of this note immediately.

  Yours ever,

  Michael Foot

  Tom sank into the old chesterfield in his rooms, gripped the arm tightly, and began to feel the perspiration on his face. Suddenly he knew what the words too clever by half really meant. Someone had used him, had wanted the Americans to know the Russians knew they were behind their Zhivago predicament. He threw the letter in the bin, but the words too clever by half kept looping in his head.

  All the rest of the day the thought kept returning, Cui buono? “Who gains?” You’re missing something. Who wanted you to know about the CIA and Dr. Zhivago? It wasn’t just an accident, Shaya Berlin’s dropping into the armchair next to him in the senior common room at Trinity. Work it out. Was it British foreign intelligence, their version of America’s CIA? Or was it counterintelligence, their FBI? Was that MI5 or was it MI6—which was which? He could never keep them straight. One was licensed to work only abroad, forbidden to act in Britain, like the CIA. The other was counterintelligence—catching other people’s spies inside Britain, like the FBI, not allowed abroad. Then he realized, MI5, MI6? It can’t be either one. British counterintelligence�
��MI5, he believed it was—had no brief to embarrass the Americans. Foreign intelligence—MI6—then? No. They were on the same side as the CIA. It could only be the Russians, it stood to reason. Turn Dr. Zhivago from “great” literature suppressed into just another front in the Cold War—“prove” the book to have been disseminated by the CIA. Pure propaganda. Clever. But how could they have arranged for Sir Isaiah Berlin to drop the hint?

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was a morning in mid-December that Liz and Tom were first spotted together by someone they knew, standing on the platform awaiting the 8:15 to London.

  “Don’t turn round,” Liz said. “There’s Mrs. Selwyn from Park Town crescent not ten feet behind you.”

  “What shall we do?”

  “You walk down the platform away from her. I’ll read my paper standing here. After a while I’ll catch her eye, see if she’s noticed you.” Tom gave a slight nod. Liz added, “Meet me on the Circle line platform at Paddington.”

  Tom lingered in his seat when the train arrived in London, and was the last to walk down the platform. There, ahead of him, he saw Liz, practically arm in arm with a middle-aged lady. The two women walked right past the clock and down into the Circle and District line station. What to do? If she sticks with Liz right down to the Circle line, it’ll be too dangerous to follow them. He walked over to a kiosk, purchased a Manchester Guardian, and began to look for a review he had written only a few days before. He read it over twice, to calm himself and give the two women time to catch their trains. Would Liz go to work, to the hotel they’d been using, somewhere else? Did he dare approach Beatrice Russell again?