The Other Side of Silence

“All right. I’ll call Patrick Dean tonight. And you call your people in MI6. But not here, eh? We’ll do it back at the hotel. Much as I admire Somerset Maugham as a writer I just don’t trust the old bugger. Or any of these awful queers he surrounds himself with. Least of all that fucking German, Walter Wolf. He may not be queer but he’s got the look of a Nazi. And let’s not forget that Maugham is an old Russia hand. He was running agents in Russia when you and I were in short trousers. Not just in Russia. But in Washington, too. Perhaps it’s no accident that Guy Burgess was here, in this house, back in nineteen thirty-seven.”

“So was Anthony Blunt.”

“That doesn’t fill me with optimism, either. The GRU-run Comintern was based in Paris. But they were almost as active down here on the Riviera, recruiting Communist refugees from the Spanish Civil War in Marseilles. Anyone shopping for suitable agents in the South of France would certainly have been interested in some of the men who were guests of Somerset Maugham in nineteen thirty-seven. After all, most of them were already leading very secret lives because of their sexual predilections. That’s always been something attractive to the Russians.”

“Blunt again.”

“He’s been interviewed by MI5, hasn’t he? As a possible suspect.”

“Several times. The FBI has had him in their sights for a while. But Courtney Young-who interrogated him-insists Anthony Blunt is innocent. That it’s just guilt by association. Still, we’ve only Anthony’s word for it that the photograph was stolen from his flat at the Courtauld in London.”

“Perhaps one of the queers who were here in nineteen thirty-seven was already a Red. I think we should ask Maugham if we can see this picture, don’t you?”

“If he’ll let you. He’s a cagey old sod.”

“Do you think he could be a Russian agent? He wouldn’t be the first Communist to own a fucking Picasso.”

“Including Picasso.”

TWENTY-SIX

Maugham was seated at the table in his brightly lit office. He tossed me a towel with which to wipe the soot off my hands, which had been clinging on to the chimney for the best part of twenty minutes.

“You were right about the chimney,” I said. “I heard every word. They’re going to pay you the money. There’s no question of that. But I wouldn’t believe a word they say about anything else. Those two are properly rattled by that tape.”

Maugham nodded grimly.

“Sometimes I think I’ll probably die at this desk,” he said quietly. “Like a spavined horse in harness. With a half-finished novel or play on the go. I often think of starting a new book just so I can make that possible, like Dickens. At other times I look at the painted bedstead in my bedroom and imagine what I’ll look like when at last I’m lying there dead, laid out like Miss Havisham’s wedding breakfast. Not good, I think. Not good at all, I’m afraid.”

“Is there a good way to look when you’re dead?”

“The embalmers would have you believe that the best way to look when you’re dead is alive. Healthy pallor, red cheeks, pink lips. Which I must say seems rather creepy to me. You’d think it wouldn’t bother me. But every morning when I awaken I look in the mirror and I can’t believe how much like a corpse I already am.”

“I’ve seen a lot of dead people in my time. More than is good for me, frankly. On the whole, the dead don’t mind what they look like. And I’d have thought having a face like shit is the best guarantee that you’ve had a full life. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway.”

“By that standard I’ve lived at least two lives, both of them like Dorian Gray’s picture. Then again, all bodies are imperfect, aren’t they? Even those that we mistakenly idealize. Take that picture on the wall there. Eve by Paul Gauguin. You know why I bought her? To remind me how ugly I find women. That and because she has seven toes on her left foot. It’s almost as if Gauguin wants to remind us just how imperfect we all are. How fundamentally none of us is ever to be trusted. Imagine if she was wearing a nice pair of court shoes. You might never know she’s not all that she seems.”

I looked at the picture and nodded. “She’s not my type,” I said. “I do know that. I like my women to look more like women than Wallace Beery. That’s why high heels were invented, isn’t it? To stop women looking like us.”

“And you wonder why your relationships go wrong? Take it from Gauguin. You can’t trust Western ideals of beauty, Walter. Every angel is really a devil. And every woman is a whore.”

“Not every woman. Only the ones who ask for money.”

“They all want money.”

“Are your boyfriends any different?”

“They’re not whores. They’re cruel because the world we live in has made them that way. Women choose to be whores because it’s just easier to take money from a man than to make some themselves.”