The Other Side of Silence

“It’s been a few years since I saw him, and many others would know better than me, but it certainly sounds like him, yes. As to whether it was actually recorded on that Russian ship, as he and Maclean fled London for Leningrad, I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Hot stuff, some of it,” muttered Robin. “Don’t you think? All that stuff about Trimalchio’s house. You wouldn’t want that to come out, Uncle Willie.”

“I suppose not,” said Maugham unhappily.

“Though some of it was really quite amusing, what? All that stuff about Clarissa Churchill?”

“The urgent question is, of course,” insisted Maugham, “where the fuck did this tape come from? And how did Harold Heinz Hebel come by it? Did the KGB send a copy to the BBC? If they did, it was obviously never used. I can’t imagine the circumstances in which they would have broadcast the whole thing. I think we’d have heard about that by now, even down here. If it was sent to the BBC, then has the BBC already shared the tape with the intelligence services? And if not, why not? Is it possible that the tape was stolen from the BBC? On the other hand, was the tape given to Hebel by someone in the KGB-someone who is intent on making more mischief in our security services? Or is it someone who just wants to make a ton of money from our security services, as Walter here suggested before? Is it worth two hundred thousand dollars to the British government to stop that tape from being sent to an American radio station?” Maugham relit his pipe and puffed it thoughtfully. “And even more importantly, is it worth two hundred thousand dollars to me? When you buy a tape recording, how do you know there isn’t a copy?”

“To that extent, it’s no different from buying a photograph,” I said. “Even if you buy the negative there’s no way of knowing how many more prints there are.”

“Those are all good questions,” said Robin. “And I wonder how on earth we can answer them?”

“I don’t know,” said Maugham. “But I do know someone who might.”

NINETEEN

I went to the Grand Hotel in Cap Ferrat, slipped on my black morning coat, and immediately I felt as if proper order had been restored to the world. It was as if I’d become a decent man again; polished and humanized, civil and courteous, and without any time for the darker shadows of feelings that pass for thoughts. Helping guests with their trivial problems, finding room keys, exchanging money, organizing porters, answering the telephone, fixing staff rotas-it was all a reassuringly long way from the tawdry world of homosexual blackmail and Soviet spies. It’s easy to believe civilization still has a bright future when you’re behind the front desk of an expensive hotel. I think I may even have managed a smile. Through the tall French windows at the far end of the lobby the cloudless sky lined the sea like a blue-edged invitation to be calm and collected. I took a deep breath and smiled again. What did I care what Guy Burgess had said to anyone about anything? None of these people mattered to me. Not even me particularly mattered to me.

In the late afternoon the hotel’s swimming instructor, Pierre Gruneberg, stopped by my desk on his way home to tell me that my second swimming lesson would have to wait a while because of the numbers of Medusa jellyfish that were presently in the bay. For some reason I had never learned, not properly, and Pierre was reputed to be an excellent instructor; he’d taught everyone from Picasso to David Niven and he’d promised to teach me, in the sea-it would never have done for me to have used the hotel pool. He always started the first swimming lesson the same way, by asking his students to put their heads in a salad bowl full of water. ‘Learn to swim without getting wet,’ he would say; it didn’t sound any more strange or perverse than what was happening up at the Villa Mauresque.

I didn’t see any sign in the hotel of Harold Hebel, but Anne French showed up for afternoon tea at around five and, by largely ignoring each other, we pretended that the intimacy that had taken place between us hadn’t happened; although it had, of course. I could still recall the turbulent emotions that had poured out of her sensuous mouth and onto the pillows of a capacious brass bed. After I’d watched her cross the floor of the lobby I opened the newspaper and looked for some sedative story that would take my mind off her naked body and what it looked like when she was bent over in front of me like the keenest entomologist. I didn’t find anything that did the job and twenty minutes later I was still marveling at my own erotic good fortune.