The Other Side of Silence

Although it was well past ten o’clock I found her typing in the guesthouse on her big pink Smith Corona. But the Hallicrafters radio was still on. I could hear the BBC World Service chattering away in the background.

Disaster was in the air, but it wasn’t the kind everyone else was expecting. This was to be a rather more bespoke, disastrous kind of disaster, created just for me.

“What’s the news?” I asked. “About Suez. Have the British invaded the zone yet? The French?”

“No. But it’s not looking good.”

She was wearing a crocheted white dress, with little flowers on the hem. Her feet were bare. In retrospect I ought to have counted the toes on her left foot just to make sure she didn’t have seven. She wasn’t wearing makeup and seemed smaller than I remembered, and just a bit more vulnerable, too. Even a little sad. She opened a bottle of wine and we drank some of it on the terrace. I told her I’d been back to the Villa Mauresque. She was quiet, unusually so, almost hermetically self-contained. And smoking a lot, too; there were at least a dozen cigarettes in the ashtray.

“Where’s the body? Floating in the pool? Or lying on the bedroom floor?”

“You’re looking at it.”

“I thought as much. Is something wrong? Only you seem a little tense.”

“Nothing serious. Just a little rigor mortis. It’s infectious when you’re researching a man like Somerset Maugham.”

She touched my face with the neatly manicured tips of her fingers and suddenly I realized how much I wanted her. I ached for her inside and I realized how much I’d missed her. And now that I had the scent of Mystikum in my nostrils, everything seemed all right; just about.

“Were you working on the biography all day?” I asked.

“Yes. I’ve been on my own too much, really. I should have gone into town, or to the Grand Hotel for a swim, but I didn’t. And it’s still in my head a bit, that’s all. Books are like that sometimes. They get jealous of time spent doing other things. A bit like husbands, I suppose.”

“Do you have many of those, too?”

She smiled sadly but didn’t answer, which left me to draw my own conclusions. Had she been married before? I realized I didn’t know and resolved to ask her everything about herself when she was feeling a little more forthcoming. Perhaps.

“How’s it going? The book, I mean.”

“Well.” She paused and lit another cigarette, inhaling it fiercely. “As well as can be expected, I guess.”

“Sounds more like a crash victim.”

She shrugged. “It’s never easy.”

“You’ve had a better time than me, at any rate. I’ve spent the whole evening at the Villa Mauresque. It’s been difficult, to say the least.”

“What happened? More hijinks?”

“You could say that.”

I hesitated for a moment, wondering for the first time just how much I could really trust her.

“Look, I hate to bring this up again, but you haven’t forgotten our deal,” I said. “That you won’t write about this until after he’s dead. Or unless I say otherwise.”

“Of course I haven’t. A deal is a deal. I’m surprised you need to ask.”

She shrugged. “But don’t tell me if you don’t want to. I shan’t mind in the slightest. Really. I was only making conversation.” She smiled thinly and looked into the distance.

“It’s just that things up at the villa are getting serious now. Maybe even dangerous. Not just for him. Perhaps me, too. And anyone close to me.” I paused to allow that one to sink in. “Meaning you, of course.”

“The plot thickens. Tell me more.”

“I’m serious.”

“I can see you are. But you needn’t worry about me, Walter. I can look after myself.”

“I do worry about you. I’ve just realized that. Maybe more than I should.”

“No one knows about us, do they?”

“No.”

“Well then.” She sounded calm-so calm that I felt there was something she had nailed down very tightly indeed, like the escape hatch on her one-man lifeboat. “There’s nothing to worry about, is there?”

“There is when there are men with guns on the scene. Up at the villa. Muscle types. Ex-army probably. The kind that shoot people and think of questions later. If they think at all.”

“But why are there men with guns? Somerset Maugham doesn’t strike me as the dangerous sort.”

“I’m not so sure about that. I thought I had a past. He’s had several. And all of them secret. You’ll have a hell of a book on your hands when you’ve finished it. What happened tonight would make a very long chapter on its own.”

Then I told her about the two spymasters from London and how, as a result of listening to the Guy Burgess tape, they thought they’d identified yet another spy working for the Soviets at the heart of the British intelligence services.

“I take it you don’t mean Somerset Maugham.”

“No, not him. Someone else.”

She laughed. “Jesus Christ, not another one. This is more than a scandal. It’s an epidemic. Who’s the spook this time?”

“Someone called Roger Hollis.”

“Never heard of him.”

“You’re not supposed to have heard of him if he’s a spy.”

“God, is he queer, too? Like the other two?”

“I don’t think so. He’s been married for almost twenty years.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”